UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi, I've been using unix at college for a few weeks now and I have come up against a few stumbling blocks:

- Most unix commands seem to work w/ regexps - the computers I and my group are allowed to logon to are all itsunXX where XX is a number. if I can {finger @itsun88} to find out that I and say "smith" are logged on , why can't I {finger @itsun*} to get a list of all those who are logged on?

- Newsgroups for my course are only accesible from the college computers. I've managed to ssh from my home computer (Windows I'm afraid) onto the machines for most things, but I don't know how to read news in linemode

TIA

The man Who

Actually only a few commands like sed and grep use regular expressions. But the commands you type are read by a shell. And shells have a filename matching system built in. So if you type "ls *.c" the shell will lool in your current directory and find a list of files whose names end in ".c". The ls command doesn't do that. The shell did it. And because you use the shell to type all your commands and most commands do use lists of filenames, it kinda looks like everything is the same.

It's pretty easy to get a files in a directory, but it's much harder to get a list of hostnames.

As for reading news, this is always done with freeware that is added on to the system. Unix does not come with newsreaders. I have no way of knowing what is available to you. But they are all "full screen" like vi or emacs; if you can run vi, you can run them. My choice would be a program called "trn", but again you will need to ask your sysadmin to find out what's available to you.